186 Days ’til 40: Exploiting Others for Personal Gain

19Aug

In this photo two signs are shown – one says “Peace Centre for the Blind” and the other says “Peace Salon for Beauty & Skin Care.” Clearly the salon was capitalizing on the Peace Center name and image when creating the salon name. I see this all the time, and I find it very disturbing.

I suppose I need to question why I find this disturbing. Isn’t this capitalism at its best? Utilizing whatever one can for advertising and personal gain? If it works it is okay, right? Particularly in this case where they may have nothing to do with each other, except the commonality of the word “peace” in their name and a shared driveway/ entrance… Perhaps it is okay……..

I don’t really know what to think – because – it’s like on hospitals .. they have hair and beauty salons too – and the gain too but on sick people, but there we see it as a service. So why shouldn’t a Peace Center for the blind not be able to do it. I don’t really understand the peace thing and why it can’t be for everybody and not only blind.

Al-Salam or Peace in Arabic is a very common word. You can find anything from barber shops to hotels named Al-Salam.
However, I’m not sure about the story behind this photo. May I know where was it taken?

It could be that both establishments are owned by the same person or family, making this nothing more than a case of blatant lack of imagination. I did get a chuckle out of the braille painted on the sign over the door, tho!

I don’t know about these two… Maybe they did sit together and talked about this, and as they both are aiming at a more peaceful world, caring for peoples well-being (even though in different ways) and share the same driveway they agreed on naming the beauty salon like this is being ok.
Maybe not, which I might would find disturbing. Generally I believe in communication. Communication and working together instead of competition and sucking at/ from each other.

This is a great point…. in this particular case, the first probably was there and the second needed to name their business so modeled it after the first….. but as long as they are both helping people it should be okay…..

Not OK at all…and why do only the blind need peace? ALL people need peace. I might add: seeing these signs are in some form of Arabic, just what IS the definition of “peace”…because it varies throughout the world.

It’s probably natural to be a little bit disturbing to be frequently confronted with the depth of blatant opportunism in human nature. — on the other hand, there’s no way to change it without limiting freedoms. Responsible people will ask questions about the values and motives of people they choose to do business with or buy services from.

I think I would need more context to judge. It reminds me though of the news in the Middle East. They often had a live person signing to translate the news. Here, we have closed captioning. So maybe this is just a matter of us processing the information from a different cultural lens and missing something?

Well, sometimes… I think you are right – there is definitely a cultural divide here… people are more likely to “use” a name of something successful to try to make their own business successful – ie: when dominoes pizza arrived here, shortly after the chain “pizza domino” emerged…….

Do we know if the two businesses are “owned” by the same party? In Los Angeles, for instance, Homeboy Industries runs a center to help gang members leave their gang and start a new life, but the non-profit also owns a bakery in which they employ those they are trying to help.

On first glance, it does look a bit disturbing; however, I wonder about the story behind the picture. Perhaps as others have suggested, there is not a monetary desire behind the Peace Hair Salon’s name. Perhaps the salon owners are merely echoing the sentiments of the philosopher Rodney King when he said, “Can’t we all just get along?”

Certainly it’s not right that whatever works is OK. Concentration camps worked and for that matter businesses made big money out of them. Ravaging the environment works if you don’t have to live with the consequences (and one big weakness of markets that most thoughtful commentators of all tendencies admit is that they think short).

I can think of one reasonable use of this – if it actually was one organisation with two or more functions. After all, blind people may still care about their appearance! Otherwise it’s exploitation. Adverts and propaganda do it all the time: associate flowers, happy children and so on with your product/cause and you’ve got a good start. This example appears to be particularly cynical because one group’s presumably unselfish good work is used by another with presumably the main aim of making money.

I found exploitative adverts in the U.K. for the National Lottery which showed a starry finger forming in a starry sky and pointing at someone – because to me that was an image of God, not of blind fate sending someone millions. However, that was not directly exploiting other people’s caring.